On this evening when, after the usual din at the doors, the motor entered the court and she alighted at the perron, two footmen busied themselves in aiding her.
Leilah passed through the dining room to the garden where for a while she walked along the path that led from the house to the gate.
The garden was cloistered, the night serene. The influences of both affected her. The darkness put her thoughts into relief, the solitude relaxed the tension of her nerves.
Another thing was helpful, the determination which she had reached, though for that determination to be maintained there must, she saw, be further hostages, new barricades. But what further hostages could she give she wondered, what firmer barricades was it possible to erect? Barring flight or an appeal to Verplank, some message begging him to leave Paris, she could not imagine any. Flight she had already tried, but not flight to some one of the world’s faraway places where anyone may be lost forever. It was a miserably dismal thing to do, she reflected, a thing so dismal and so miserable that she doubted her ability to do it.
As she thought it over she wondered if in some former existence she could have injured Verplank and whether it were by way of retribution that he had the power to tempt and torture her now. Tenets of this character the Vidya advanced and as she had told Tempest, she had come to believe in that Scripture as many do in the Bible, though as many also do without being able to accept it entirely, without being able to accept for instance stories such as that of Jonah and the whale which none the less all would accept were it known how profound is the symbolism behind them. With like reservations, Leilah accepted the Vidya. She was very ignorant as women in her station generally are and the reservations were due to that ignorance and also to the demand which the doctrine made on her imagination. But though she was ignorant she was conscious of it and consciousness of ignorance is usually the condition precedent to enlightenment.
Now, in considering the episode of the evening, she asked herself whether she was warranted in accepting this creed of past lives. At the Joyeuses, during the announcements of resonant names, Tempest had said that unless we swallow the ridiculous dogma of a soul specially created at every birth and unless too we are indecent enough to fancy the Deity waiting for that purpose on the passions and caprices of man, we have to accept it, have to accept with it the corollary of past actions and their consequences, have to accept, too, the deduction that, in accordance with our past actions, it is we who reward or punish ourselves, we who become avenging furies or angels of light.
Leilah wished that she could have discussed the matter more fully with Tempest yet she felt that what he had said was logical, but if it were true, then the parallel doctrine that all misdeeds and with them all misfortunes spring from desire must be true also, in which case, before their consequences can be effaced, all misdeeds must be atoned. But how can they be atoned? she asked herself. Presently she remembered. According to the Vidya, any desire no matter what, desire for pleasure, for gain, for attainments, for honours, even the desire for spiritual perfection, even the desire for the lack of desire, must be extinguished before old scores are paid. That was the way she saw, the only way. The debtor must sacrifice himself to himself.
But, uncertain still, she went over the matter again, putting to it little tests, passably naïf yet serviceable to her. She had ardently desired to marry Verplank, then, desiring as ardently a barricade against him, she had married Barouffski. In the one case the result had been catastrophic; in the other, calamitous. Doubtless she had sinned in the past and these disasters, brought about by her own desires, were her punishment. There were other things that she had desired. She had wanted to be loved, she had wanted to be thought a beauty, and not only her love had shamed her but soon she might be ashamed to show her face. At the thought of these things she realised anew and more profoundly than ever that selfish desire is the root of evil and that only in its extirpation may peace be had. But coincidently she realised also that any such extirpation was beyond her. Heredity, environment, the circumstances of her life, had given an impetus to desire which she could not arrest. She liked wealth, ease, pretty clothes, becoming hats, the society of agreeable people. She liked the world and in liking it she feared that she liked also the flesh, it might be even that she liked, too, the devil. Yet, she must not, she knew.
In telling herself that, she thought of the Church. The Church was so much more comfortable. There you were not asked impossibilities, the one requirement was to throw yourself in her arms and repent. As the facile process occurred to her she recalled George Moore’s story of Evelyn Innes. That masterwork seemed to tell her to do as the heroine had done and go in a convent.
Perhaps she might, she thought. Perhaps she must.
Several times already she had crossed and recrossed the garden. Now she found herself at the farther end facing the iron gate. Leilah opened it, walked to the corner and returned.
The little tentative evasion had been successful. At any time, unseen even by a servant, she could leave the house, disappear utterly, be forever ingulfed. But the knowledge that she could escape into darkness and be lost
